I first encountered Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger in college, right at the beginning of my vocal studies. Immediately I knew I was handling fire. The poetry spoke to me very directly, and once I knew the contours of Schubert’s accompaniment I was awestruck. I know it is one of the songs I will sing for the rest of my life.

Despite my intense love of the piece, my first performances of it were rather lukewarm. The high notes cracked, the low notes were little more than whispers, my face was cramping by the end of the song, having gesticulated the best sadness I thought I could convey with my eyebrows. My poor little Schatzie had left me. At the time, I only acknowledged that much of the message in the poetry, and it seemed a poem of love lost and mourned, with a general affect of melancholy.

After seven years with the piece my relationship to it has naturally grown, and now I will attempt to describe my subtext as it is today. I do not intend to rigorously analyze the piece harmonically, rather give a sense of how I see the music informing the delivery of the text, and revealing the inner state of the poem’s speaker. Any mention of the score will refer to the transposition for bass, in g-minor.

There is a game that some of the late-night talk show hosts play at the beginning of the show to waste time getting laughs in which the audience is shown a very abstract picture. In a series of a few frames, the zoom is slowly removed so that what seemed amorphous and strange is beheld as it actually is, commonplace and easily recognizable. In a similar but reverse fashion, this song takes a situation that at the start is clear and understandable and zooms in to a point where the center cannot hold, and spins out again.

The piano sneaks in on empty chords. Both hands are in the bass clef for the entire song, and the low sonority takes us down into low, dark places of the speaker’s consciousness. The missing third in the tonic chords creates hollowness, compulsion. The scene opens on a dark street, void of people. The speaker’s feet have brought him here, once again, to behold the house where his past lover lives no longer. The accompaniment mimics the vocal line twice, as the speaker mentions first his former lover, then the fact that the house remains in the same square. These repetitions are of a dwelling mind, and hints at the obsessive quality with which the speaker has been saying goodbye to his relationship.

Then, he begins to have an out-of-body experience. At first, it seems as if the speaker is apprehending another dark figure in the street. There is a man, standing alone, ringing his hands and staring into the sky. The music crescendos, as the speaker realizes the figure is very unsettling. Just as the speaker recognizes the Schmerzensgewalt, the bitter pain, that this figure is enduring the piano signals the first major epiphany of the piece with afortississimo chord. This chord should be played with all possible force on the keys and literally shake the piano—it is the truth trying to break free, almost too much. It is interesting to note that the triple-forte chord comes a beat before the “Schmerzensgewalt.” The piano quickly withdraws into the shadows again as the speaker tries to objectify this strange, pained man—”mir graust es, it horrifies me.” Yet the long crescendo draws the speaker inevitably towards his second epiphany. The second fortississimo chord occurs right as he says “meine eigne Gestalt.” The confluence of this chord and this syllable are of utmost importance, since it is a lining-up of sorts of the speaker’s powers of perception. He at once beholds his own form and sees into the heart of his obsession, into the heart of his pain, and takes ownership of his own lot for a moment. In a way he looks backwards through his own eyes, if only briefly. Contrasted with the empty, almost habitually torturous way the speaker entered the scene, this outburst of powerful revelation seems drastic. If there is any moment in the song, whether poetic or harmonic, to find a new direction, then this is it. But for any number of reasons the moment passes. The speaker once again objectifies his own gestalt, calling it this time a Doppelganger, a phantom-double, which apes the pain that has tortured him in this place.

There is quite a lot of anger in the music, flaring up chromatically into b-minor. There are now two measures of triple-forte, two chords transitioning back into an extended cadence in g-minor, decreasing to piano. The speaker’s final words “so manche Nacht, in alter Zeit? (so many nights, in another time)” draw him back helplessly into the past, and the energy surge is ended. For now, he is still doomed to repeat this unnerving scene, as the piano gives us again the original progression in g-minor, yet with an important difference. The third is now included in the tonic chord, and rounds out the harmony. Perhaps the speaker now feels a little bit more of his own grief. Will this be an ultimately redemptive process? Schubert delivers us into a sublime g-major cadence at the end of the piece, yet it is inconclusive what, exactly, it means.

If the piece is viewed as a series of dynamic peaks and valleys, then it begins very softly, rises to triple forte three times to punctuate the words “Schmerzensgewalt”, “Gestalt”, and the transition back into reminiscent pain on “so manche Nacht”, and then softly exitspianississimo in major mode. Perhaps the speaker finds a restful mind at the end of the song, or perhaps Schubert himself is blessing this process of grief. What is left is to investigate for oneself what motivates this process of recursion into the past and the grief it causes the speaker of the poem, and ourselves.

Two of Franz Peter Schubert’s latest and greatest works of chamber music were composed within his last few years of life. His G Major String Quartet (D. 887, Opus 161) dates from 1826, and the C Major String Quintet (D. 956, Opus 163) was written in 1828, only months before the composer’s death. Schubert never heard either work performed, and the two works share a similar early history: both were neglected for quite some time after their composition, and both received their first performance in 1850. The group performing the premiere of the string quartet on December 8th of 1850 was an ensemble led by Joseph Hellmesberger (director of the Vienna Conservatory at the time), and the same ensemble, in fact, had premiered the string quintet on November 18th, only three weeks earlier. Apart from their biographical similarities, the two works share many musical characteristics, ranging from overall structure to harmonic, motivic, and melodic traits. I will mention some points about the commonalities of both works as wholes, but I will focus my comparison on their respective second movements (the slow movements).

The two most striking features of these works are perhaps also the factors that cause the seemingly “bright” keys of G major and C major to come across with a rather dark and deep character. These are Schubert’s timbral exploration and the constant conflict between major and minor modes. The latter provides an undercurrent of ambiguity which carries from the very beginning of each piece right through to the end. This contrast is exemplified in the opening measures of the two works. The string quartet begins with a tonic G major triad in the upper three voices, tied for two bars. The chord swells from piano to forte, and then is immediately destabilized when, in the third bar, it resolves to a G minor chord. The quintet, as well, begins with all but the lowest voice, swelling on a tonic triad. This chord is destabilized by moving to a common tone diminished chord, the common tones being the Cs in the upper and lower voices. While the violin and cello hold their pitches, the inner voices change, creating an internal conflict in the truest sense.

Apart from the major/minor element, Schubert, in these two works, also undergoes a timbral exploration of the middle and lower ranges of the string ensemble. His choice to call for an extra cello in the string quintet (instead of the more standard extra viola, as Mozart preferred) was virtually unprecedented: Boccherini had written cello quintets, but their nature was more in showcasing the virtuosic capabilities of the first cellist, and not at all equal like Schubert’s parts are. It is clear, even in looking at the G Major String Quartet that Schubert was fascinated by the timbral possibilities of the cello’s tenor range: in much of the second movement the viola provides the bass while the cello sings above, and the two instruments only reverse roles when the viola reaches the lowest limit of its range (see for example: II, m. 19-30). By adding a second cello, he is able to have the best of both worlds, exploiting the heights and depths of the instruments’ registers, and providing new opportunities for voice pairings and crossings. In the second movement of the quintet, m. 26-28, Schubert gives the first cello a line in the same range as the first violin, and ultimately the phrase ends with the cello as soprano.

On a structural level, the slow movement (Andante un poco moto) of the quartet and the slow movement (Adagio) of the quintet have similarities and differences. Their main melodies are both in the key of E (in the case of the quartet, E minor, vi of G; in the case of the quintet E major, III of C). The quartet places the melody in the cello, with accompanying embellishments in the upper voices. The quintet opens with a slow-moving, almost timeless theme in the middle three voices, with the outer voices providing bass and embellishment. Both works feature a stormy, even violent B section, providing dramatic contrast to the A material, and in each the return to the A section is relieving but not fully settling. When in the quartet Schubert brings back the A section, it is developed and embellished, he adds a countermelody (example: m. 90, m. 111), lays out the second part of the theme in canon (m. 98-105), and changes voicing and pairings. He also brings back the stormy B section in a shorter version, this time in D minor, creating an overall “slow-rondo” structure (A B A’ B’ A”). The quintet is structurally simpler. Here the return of the A section, in the inner voices, is exactly the same as the opening, save for a few subtle dynamic differences. What has changed is the outer voices, who had earlier provided a rather sparse accompaniment of pizzicati and bowed commentary, now wind and weave with much more flowing and conversational embellishments of the theme. A most incredible moment comes at the end of the A’ section, in m. 91, whereas in A the music cadences in E major and then turns tonic into leading tone to lead into the middle section. This time the E major chord opens out into a C major chord, the dominant of our all-too-familiar and terrifying F minor, which surges up, but then sinks back by way of a rather magical augmented sixth chord (m. 92, beat 3), leading to the last sigh of a cadence.

It seems that Schubert went to his furthest reaches of experimentation in the G major string quartet, using new colors and timbres, effects, and that by the time he wrote the string quintet he was ready to attempt the ultimate levels of simplicity, not writing a bar more than necessary to say what he had to say. The quintet’s Adagio movement somehow manages to be all at once rich and transparent, fleeting and simple, stormy but not clouded over, and even combines darkness with light.

It is interesting to look at key structures in Schubert’s slow movements, and equally fascinating to see how he transitions from one place to the next. In the string quartet’s Andante un poco moto, the overall layout is as follows:

40-42 Transition Here Schubert brings all four instruments together in octaves and simply slides downwards from E, through E flat, to D, which becomes V of G minor (3rd relation, E-G)

43-80 B section: 43-59 G minor, again ending on D, alluding to dominant of G, but uses the same transitional tactic of all instruments in octaves, sliding down one chromatic tone to C#, which becomes the dominant of F#. 63-80 in F# minor, cadencing in major.

A few more minor points of interest on the melodies in Schubert’s quartet and quintet: The melody of the quintet’s Adagio resembles the opening melody of his song “Auf dem Strom”, which is in the same key and was written in the same month as the quintet. I also see a resemblance, shapewise, between the A melody of the quartet’s Andante un poco moto (m. 3) and the B melody in the quintet’s Adagio (m. 30). And a small motivic similarity: Quartet, II, m. 97 (ending the first phrase of A), Schubert writes a scale figure from 5 to 1 with the following rhythm: In m. 14 of the quintet we have that same rhythmic figuration, also on a scale from 5 to 1, and ending the first phrase from A.

There are countless other similarities in these and in the other movements of the two chamber works, but I have tried, by looking more in depth at these two movements to discover and describe some of the evolution Schubert’s ensemble writing made over the course of his final years.

Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, Op. 163, D. 956, was composed in his last year and completed only a few weeks before his death on the afternoon of November 19, 1828. It was not until twenty-two years later, on November 17, 1850, that the work received its premiere performance. Another three years were to elapse before the work was published. In a letter to the publisher Heinrich Albert Probst of Leipzig dated October 2, 1828, he mentions a private rehearsal of the quintet might soon take place, but most likely Schubert died before ever hearing his music played.

The middle movements of the quintet bear a similarity of structure; they are both in ABA form with a very contrasting middle section. The adagio’s middle contrasting section is an increase of rhythmic motion, whereas the scherzo’s trio (marked andante sostenuto) is the opposite; we reach a place that seems outside of time. Spacious chords in a macro, French-overture style rhythm create a never-ending journey that modulates to ever more remote keys.

Most performances of the Trio of the Schubert’s cello quintet slow down substantially before returning to the robust theme of the scherzo, even though Schubert never marks any rubato or ritardando, and in fact writes no expressive markings outside of dynamics. Schubert himself (unlike Beethoven) has also been known to dislike arbitrary alterations of tempo. The baritone Johann Michael Vogl (1768-1840), who was not only Schubert’s close friend but the singer whom Schubert admired above all others, nevertheless recounts that during rehearsals, Schubert would frequently admonish him with: “Kein Ritardando” or “Keine Fermate” (“No ritardando”, “No fermata”).1Deutsch, Otto Eric: Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde, p. 291. Leipzig, 1966. In a letter dated May 10, 1828 to the publisher Probst regarding the E-flat Piano Trio, D. 929, he writes: “See to it that really capable players are found for the first performance, and above all, where the time changes in the last section, that the rhythm is not lost.”2“The Other Great C Major, Reflections on Schubert’s String Quintet,” James Nicholas. A similar meter change is found in the last movement of the B-flat trio, D. 898, where the time shifts from 2/4 to 3/2; there it is more obvious that the implication is that half-note equals half-note.

The first edition of the cello quintet featured an alle breve marking for the trio, and subsequent editions inexplicably changed this to C. Being the hinge of the entire quintet, how performers interpret the tempo relationship between the trio and the scherzo greatly influences the success of the entire performance.

The recordings we investigated showed a wide contrast of interpretation in this regard. There is a considerable range of tempi and their relationships; only one recording seems to attempt to maintain faithfulness to Schubert’s intentions in regard to tempo relationship.

Stradivarius Ensemble with Anner Bylsma (1990)

Of these two recordings we found of Pablo Casals, both had very similar tempi in both the scherzo and trio, which is more moderate =107. Both trios started around =37, with a graduate slow-down, and less emphasis on expressive rubatos.

Yo-Yo Ma with Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma with the Cleveland Quartet

The treatment of the Trios is quite similar starting out around =33. Many timings lead to a slower and slower tempo reaching the remarkably slow tempo of =28. The Cleveland recording is the most romantically extraverted, using rubato in the true sense of the word, moving forward through the moving dotted figures enabling less overall time to be lost while taking time in the chords. This interpretation feels more gestural but due to the elasticity of rhythm we lose the French overture feel.

Emerson Quartet with Rostropovitch

The Emerson’s performance sounds the most square in rhythm of the recordings we listened to, with sterilized and seemingly unfeeling timings. The feeling of cut time is all but completely lost, and most of the movement sounds in 4/4. Their straight treatment of dotted rhythms, while accurate, take away from the forward motion inherent a French overture. The final tempo before the recapitulation of the scherzo is a mere 3 counts slower.

Bobby Mann, San Francisco Conservatory of Music Faculty (4/23/03)

In both the scherzo and trio this in-house recording featured more timings than any other recording. Their scherzo was =100 and the trio =38-30. Perhaps because this was a live recording, the performers took more dramatic liberties than those making a recording.

Guarneri Quartet and Bernard Greenhouse

This recording features “placement-style” timings within a gradually slowing tempo. They use a similar use of rubato to that of the Yo-yo Ma with the Cleveland Quartet. The moving lines with dotted figures push forward into the two bar chords, which are held back slightly.

Marlboro Festival Quintet

This is the only recording in which the players attempted a reasonable tempo relationship between the half-note of the scherzo =104 and quarter note trio =91. The trio’s tempo is also the fastest, with only a reasonable loss in tempo before the return of the scherzo. This group’s interpretation is the closest to the manuscript. Even though they adamantly guard the loss of their tempo, none of the intimacy of feeling is lost, and their thorough feeling of cut-time hints at the French overture.

While the Marlboro festival recording is the only one that attempts to stay faithful to Schubert’s tempo indications, others, most notably the Stradivarius ensemble recording, still succeed by deeply feeling the music in cut-time. The Emerson quartet feel the rhythm of the trio quite in 4/4, sterile with timings; their rhythmic feel is stingy and unfeeling, in direct opposition to the Marlboro festival recording which meters out the time with great precision, yet they always retain a sense of the intimacy and other-worldly quality of the trio. The popular trend to gradually slow during the trio is most likely due to a desire to express the great beauty of the chords growing ever distant from the tonic, and in itself is not an erroneous interpretation. Many of these recordings are profoundly moving in their treatment of the trio, and whether they keep the tempo relationship does not take the beauty away from the music, and in fact when executed correctly enhances the contrast of this voluminous trio.

Serious music programming is an ongoing challenge. Creating programs that are inventive, interesting and have a chance to sell well is increasingly difficult, considering that contemporary audiences seem to be neither as culturally literate nor as intellectually curious as their counterparts from 50 years ago. How do we preserve the integrity of art music, and still manage to sell it to the public, while giving them a real reason to be interested?

One model is to assemble programs with jarring contrasts, leaps from the wildly avant-garde to the traditional, with a common thread between, or to simply demonstrate the extremes of range in repertoire in pieces abutting one another on a program. But a more subtle approach lies in creating contexts that demonstrate surprising relationships and differences in the repertoire in unexpected places, historically. Consider a program from a recent [2005] pair of concerts by the Chicago-based Callisto Ensemble:

The program was played on period instruments, lending an air of discovery to the audience experience; the balances and textures, especially with chamber music involving fortepiano, make these pieces sound utterly new to audiences accustomed to modern style instruments. Further, the assembled works expose key developments in compositional style over the relatively narrow time span of the works, 1778-1802.

Perhaps the most striking and surprising feature of the above program is the fact that the Haydn work actually post-dates the Beethoven trio! While it is wonderful piece that typifies the consistently high quality of the composer’s output, the Haydn trio is a conservative and traditional style work. Written in 1795, the piece looks backward more than forward stylistically and compositionally.

Many of the essential building blocks of Beethoven’s style are in evidence in the Haydn work and it is not difficult to demonstrate the influence Haydn had over his younger colleague and sometime student. But in the Opus 1, No. 3, Beethoven was already breaking radical ground compositionally, so much so that Haydn, upon first hearing the work recommended against its publication on grounds that it would not find an audience. It is difficult to place the Haydn trio anywhere within ten years before the composition of the Beethoven Opus 1, No. 3, but indeed the Haydn follows the Beethoven chronologically, an incredible shocker for nearly any audience.

The program under discussion straddles a key development in the use of instruments as well: the Mozart Sonata is composed for Pianoforte with Violin Obbligato. The key instrument is clearly the pianoforte, and while the violin has some independence, it is often shadowing the right hand of the keyboard instrument. Fully independent writing was not the norm in 1778, and Mozart’s Sonata conforms to custom.

In the Haydn Trio the violin has a similarly intermittent independence, while the cello plays a largely supporting role, doubling the left hand part of the keyboard in a continuo manner. But in the Beethoven Opus 1, No. 3, the three voices are more completely independent of one another, and the cello in particular has a strikingly important, independent role.

Increasingly during the classical period, the cello gained recognition as a potential solo instrument, and Beethoven responded. In the variations from 1802 the cello has a featured role as an equal to the keyboard, a dramatic leap that will pave the way for the intricate independent voicing of the Romantic era.

It requires relatively little talking to inform the audience of these issues and by doing so one gives audience members the key elements of the program to take ownership of. Without being patronizing, employing gimmicky publicity, or pandering, one can present a program that makes standard masterworks relevant, and gives audiences a reason to listen to a program in a traditional and accessible language.

How are cherished art works of the past best served and most deeply savored? A visitor to the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo will find the remains and restoration of only what Piero della Francesco himself painted in the great 15th century frescoes. The restorer has removed all of the renderings of the many subsequent artists who sought to keep the paintings in good repair, and painstakingly returned them to their true, original layer. Pianist Artur Schnabel advocated a close and reverent examination of musical texts, as the means by which the original work of the composer could be reclaimed from its misrepresentation and distortion at the hands of the nineteenth century virtuoso.

These two examples reflect a serious and welcome trend toward a respect for the work of art as its creator conceived it, as a means to experience its revelations. Who better than the artist can show us the truth? Even the most careful editors and restorers have sometimes led us astray. We must now depend on the research of dedicated scholars to return us to the primary work.

In his lengthy and detailed account, Franz Schubert’s Music in Performance, musicologist David Montgomery seeks to deliver the composer’s music from what he perceives as the many departures from the true path that have been taken over the past hundred and fifty years. Since most of Schubert’s music, especially the instrumental music was published after his death, it is Montgomery’s view that Schubert was the victim of his publishers. He could not defend himself against sloppy editing, including willful, uninformed changes in the texts. Montgomery gives us convincing evidence to show that Schubert was precise and careful in crafting his manuscripts, and that details such as dynamics, articulation, tempo, repeats, bowings and ornaments are structurally significant and deserve close scrutiny.

Montgomery takes vigorous stands on a number of topics, and does not hesitate when it come to fingering the guilty parties. In particular Walter Dürr, editor of the Neue Schubert Ausgabe is singled out for some scathing criticism regarding details in the music.

Assimilation, i.e., playing the final note of a triplet with the final note of a dotted 8th and 16th figure when they are presented simultaneously is, in Montgomery’s view, absolutely unacceptable, and he and pianist Paul Badura-Skoda, among others, have been debating the point for years.

Montgomery is equally fervent on the subject of intuition and performance clichés, which can diminish the serious impact of Schubert’s music. One example of this is the tempo customarily taken in the opening theme of the second movement of the E flat Trio, D 929, which is too slow to match the tempo of its reappearance in the Finale, when surrounded by faster-moving material. The slower tempo at the opening may allow for great expressiveness on the part of the performer, but it makes no structural sense in the context of the work as a whole.

The unmarked ritard and late Viennese Schrammelmusik (rustic, boisterous Alpine dance music) hesitation in the following passage of the Finale of the C Major Quintet, D 956. is another good example of the type of performers’ indulgence that Montgomery feels is completely inappropriate to Schubert’s music.

The volume fade on the final note of this work was for more than a century standard practice among chamber musicians, simply because the editors of the first (Spina 1853) and later editions, as well as several performing editions had read Schubert’s expressive mark as a hairpin decrescendo, instead of an accent. As Montgomery accurately observes, the decrescendo is completely out of context, and recently the Neue Schubert Ausgabe (NSA) editor, Martin Chusid, has restored the accent. Now some ensembles are responding to the logic of it.

A fascinating observation of the composer’s detailed and demanding articulation is his slur over the pizzicato notes in the cello, in the variation movement of the d minor Quartet, D 810.

Montgomery cites this as an example of Schubert’s sonic, structural and notational idealism, in this case a commentary on the violin’s portando figure in m 47. The text goes on to consider and elaborate on four different kinds of pizzicato in Schubert scores.

These examples relating to string technique and interpretive issues in a few of the true masterworks of the Chamber Music repertoire are but a fraction of the material covered in this voluminous book. The same detail is applied as well to Schubert’s piano, vocal and symphonic works, with an additional look at a few operatic scores. A helpful and exhaustive appendix provides a list of pedagogical work relevant to the study of Viennese music from the time of the middle of Mozart’s career. It is a virtual cornucopia of material on the history of performance practice for the serious scholar or for the merely curious.

This book is an important guide to the music of Franz Schubert for the performer, as well as the listener. David Montgomery’s credentials as scholar and performer are well established. Here he uses them to return the reader to the original score and musical intent of the composer, while raising intriguing questions regarding authenticity, interpretation, history, and performance practice.